Looks Like You're Having Some Trouble
by Asidian
Summary: Wilson wasn't the only one Maxwell offered to help. (Or: A series of one-shots about how a certain dapper gentleman recruited adventurers for a strange new world.)
1. Chapter 1

I couldn't help but think, after seeing Wilson's backstory trailer and noting Webber's comments about Maxwell, that Wilson wasn't the only one who was offered assistance.

So have a series of one-shots, about promises that keep the to the letter of the offer without really giving people what they wanted at all. At this point, I definitely have ideas for Willow, Wendy, Wes, and Webber, so expect those four, at least.

* * *

Chapter 1: Wickerbottom

* * *

Eleanor Wickerbottom would turn seventy-six this March.

She'd outlived both of her children – little Mary, who died in her cradle of the croup, and rambunctious Alexander, only four years old, who'd drowned in the creek behind their house.

She'd outlived her husband John, a brilliant botanist who'd shared both his thoughts and his notes, and who'd thought it not at all strange to keep his wife as his assistant. She'd learned from him the proper definition of a conifer – noun, any of various cone-bearing gymnospermous trees or shrubs of the order Coniferales. She'd learned how to differentiate types of fern: _Microsorum pteropus_ versus _Asplenium scolopendrium_ versus _Athyrium filix_ - _femina_ _._ She'd learned the objectivity of a scientist, and the proper format for research papers, and the acceptable style for ink illustrations of flora and fauna.

God rest his soul, it had been an accident on an icy night, back when carts had been drawn by horses and not powered by motor.

And in one brief, cruel moment, Eleanor had become a widow at twenty-five, and her in the great state of New York, which had seen fit to repeal certain relevant portions of the Married Women's Earnings Act.

She'd answered the door one day to a fresh young face with slicked back hair and an insufferable smirk. She'd answered the door to a shark in a well-pressed suit, and signed all of the papers he set before her, because she hadn't had a choice. They'd taken John's house, with the cradle and the creek, and she'd been left on her own.

It had been 1875, then – back before women bobbed their hair and wore daring beaded dresses and flocked to the city for jobs as typists.

She'd penned her own applications by hand, in neat script. She'd attached her experience – volunteer work at New York University, where John had done his research – along with research papers of her own. She'd signed her name "E. Wickerbottom," and waited for a response.

She'd gone to Columbia, and to Harvard, and to St. John's. She'd walked into plush offices with men in silk hats, and they'd taken one look at her modest black skirt and neatly pinned-back hair and barked out startled laughter.

At Yale, she'd marched straight up to this newest silk-hatted old man, and she'd sat herself down in a chair of polished chestnut. She'd said, "Take me on for five days. If you think you can find a better candidate by the end of the day on Friday, I'll never set foot on this campus again."

By the end of the day on Friday, she had turned the shabby stacks of chaos in Yale's library into something a military sergeant would have admired for its efficiency. She had acquainted herself at least passingly with every topic and where it could be found, and she'd helped two young physicists choose and embark upon a topic for their thesis.

A year before Melvil Dewey first published the Dewey Decimal System, Eleanor Wickerbottom laid out plans for a library classification system based not on the date of book receipt but on topic and author name, with careful numbers to log each location.

She got the job.

She had been there ever since, running the shelves like a much-beloved machine – oiling and changing parts, tinkering with proverbial wrenches when something squeaked even slightly.

They had been good years, full of pages that whispered like the dry leaves of _Acer_ _saccharu_. She'd spent long, sleepless nights reading not just botany texts, but everything else her library held besides. She had consumed tomes of astronomy, chemistry, and genetics. She'd crammed her head full of medicine, and history, and law. She doodled mathematic equations in her library ledgers. She practiced the proper fauna illustration techniques that her husband had taught her so long ago.

And she wrote. Copiously.

She wrote treatises and dissertations. She wrote research papers, and historical studies and once, even, an analysis of the political situation in the country. (Verdict: disgraceful.)

She spent her days among aisles of books, and she watched the confident young men of Yale plan their lives.

She helped them find what they wanted to study; she chastised them when their hypotheses were obtuse, or poorly conceived, or when they had been proposed and disproven years before.

They called her old lady Wickerbottom. She could not help but think that, had she been a man – had she attended Yale instead of tending its library – it ought to have been Doctor Wickerbottom by now.

Still. They had been good years.

She had her books to keep her company, and she penned books of her own to keep her mind sharp in the dark of the night. And if there were regrets, well. Eleanor supposed that one did not reach the age of seventy-five without some misgivings.

It would have carried on that way, she suspected. Perhaps she would have died at eighty-two, curled up in an armchair by her fire, with an unpublished manuscript in her lap, had she not chanced to drop the Encyclopedia of Animal Anatomy one day while restocking a shelf.

The book had fallen to the floor with a solid thump, pages fluttering open to a place in the middle where blank white space stared up at her like the milky eyes of certain fish in the family _Anoplogastridae_.

And there, in that blank white space, writing had appeared.

"Say, pal," said the script, flowing and lively. "Guess what? I know a place where you can publish all the books you want."


	2. Chapter 2

I know that Wendy and Abigail's flowers are probably not actually camellias (the petals look a little off) but I really liked the idea of using camellias for the purpose of this fic. I remember reading somewhere that in Japanese flower lore, they symbolize a life cut short, and that they're considered something of an ill omen because of it.

* * *

Chapter 2: Wendy

* * *

Wendy's very first memory was of standing at the foot of a staircase.

They were proper stairs, hard marble, polished and pretty. They were not the stairs at home, where the wood was scuffed and well-used, oh no. They were nice stairs – dress for company, we're going out for tea stairs – and Abigail had been at the top of them, hiking up her skirt to climb onto the railing.

Wendy remembered her mother's voice, drifting in from another room: "Don't you dare, young lady!"

She remembered Abigail's grin, wide and excited. She remembered gazing anxiously up at her sister from the foot of the stairs, wringing her hands.

And then Abigail had come sliding down the banister side-saddle, shot off the end like a jack-in-the-box exploding after the crank is turned. She'd landed inelegantly, staggered, righted herself. Their mother had appeared then, an imposing figure all in grey, and Abigail had kicked off her shoes and run, tiny pale feet disappearing into the dimness of a formal hallway.

Looking back now, heavy with knowledge, Wendy thought: she might have fractured her skull. Death comes to us all, and hers might as easily have been then.

But it had not been.

It had come instead in the garden, on a mild and sunny afternoon, the camellia trees swaying in a gentle breeze. Abigail had been lying in the grass, heedless of her lovely yellow dress, and Wendy had been sitting on the bench, knees tucked carefully together.

The low hum of bees was in the air, and there up in the branches, the red petals looked soft and inviting.

Wendy said, "One day I'll be tall enough to reach the camellias, and I'll have a fresh flower for my hair every day."

And Abigail had sat up, smiled the wicked smile that meant she was planning something mother wouldn't like, and said, "You can have a fresh flower now."

She'd begun to unbuckle her dress shoes, revealing pale toes beneath, and Wendy had added, hastily, "Oh, no. Oh, don't get one on my account."

But it was too late by then, of course. Wendy was eleven years old; she ought to have known that there was no calling back her sister once she got an idea into her head.

Abigail was already locking her fingers around the lowest branch, scrambling up with bare feet and scabbed knees. "I'll get one for myself, then, too."

Wendy hadn't tried to call her back again – and later, when the sun had long set and Wendy was lying in bed staring up at the ceiling, she would recall this. It would seem to her that no other person in history had ever committed so egregious a sin.

She only watched as Abigail scaled the camellia tree with strong arms and lithe grace. She only smiled as Abigail plucked a camellia and tossed it down to her. "What will mother say? You've torn another dress."

But she retrieved the flower all the same, tucked it behind her ear.

"I'll say I was trying to be a lady, just like she always wants me to. You see?" Abigail reached for another branch, braced her foot and pushed. "Picking flowers for my hair. Why, that's the most ladylike thing I've done all –"

The sound was like a clap of thunder, hard and near – the kind of thunder that shook windows.

It was not thunder at all, though, but the sound of the branch breaking, hard and final.

There was an instant when Abigail's fingers tightened and she dangled, bare feet kicking, as she struggled to pull herself up. Then her grip came free and she fell, twenty feet, onto an ugly outcropping of roots.

The sound when she hit was not like thunder at all. It was like a twig snapping, small and dry.

Abigail was lying face down, but her neck was twisted so far that it looked like a careless child had screwed a doll's head on backward. The flower she'd been reaching for fluttered to the ground by her fingers, just in reach.

"Abigail?" Wendy said, numbly.

But Abigail did not answer, and Wendy started to scream, high and shrill and panicked, until her mother had heard and come to the garden to see what the matter was.

At the funeral, they laid Abigail out in a small coffin, in a pristine white dress. On her feet were polished shoes that she would have hated.

Wendy wore two red flowers in her hair, though both were starting to wilt.

They'll die soon, she thought as she fondled the petals. Their fragile existence is cut short as easily as ours.

They set Abigail in the ground, and Wendy stood with leaking eyes and thought about how the worms would eat her sister – how they, in turn, would spend their little worm lives beneath the soil before they were taken from this world.

But after the funeral, life went on.

Wendy picked at her dinner most nights and told herself that she wasn't hungry. Deep down, where she did not like to look too closely, she told herself that the human body could not last indefinitely without food, and that perhaps the worms could have her, too.

A month passed, and a frail little girl spent longer and longer hours in the garden, beneath her sister's tree, with two dried flowers in her hair.

She plucked at blades of grass, and she rocked her giant's thumb onto helpless ants, and she became certain, so certain, that it would not be long now. She had been with Abigail her entire life. Surely she would join her sister again soon.

Wendy closed her eyes against the wide blue arc of the sky, blotting out the sun. She leaned her head back against the tree – and a voice spoke directly into her ear, soft as a breath of breeze.

"Say, pal," said that voice, low and sympathetic. "Bet you'd like to see your sister again, huh?"


	3. Chapter 3

Not gonna lie, this chapter gave me a ton of trouble. I rewrote this thing like five times.

Three times for focus, twice because I screwed myself on the timeline. Everything should be canon-compliant now. Yay, small victories!

* * *

Chapter 3: Wes

* * *

Wes' father marched out of Paris in a crisp, buttoned uniform in the mid-summer of 1892. Wes was five years old at the time, thin fingers locked with his mother's so that she did not lose him in the crowd.

Her hand was strong and wiry, and she called out for Wes' father to come home victorious, and to come home soon.

Wes could say none of those things. He raised his free hand, and he waved until his father was out of sight, one more in a row of men disappearing into the distance.

That was the last time they saw him.

All around Paris, the letters came: "Je te présente mes sincères condoléances."

They flew in like the flocks of birds on the city's statues, bringing news that no one wanted to hear. So very sorry, your husband has given his life in the service of France. So very sorry, your father won't be coming home again.

Wes' mother found work in a factory making clothing. She could not pay for his tuition any more, and so he did not go to school. Instead, she left him home with paper and pen, told him that he must practice his writing, for how else would he make himself understood?

("Disruption of the recurrent laryngeal nerve," the doctor had said, three days after the accident. "When will he speak again?" Wes' mother had asked, and Wes' father had put an arm around her, and there had been a pretty consolation that amounted to never. )

Each day, Wes wrote until his hand cramped. Each night, his mother returned exhausted. Sometimes, when she thought that he was sleeping, Wes could hear her weeping through the wall.

When she died, no letter came.

Three long days passed without her return, and by the time the knock sounded at their apartment door, Wes had already begun to suspect. "Je te présente mes sincères condoléances," said the man who brought the news. "It was an accident with the machinery."

In the years that followed, Wes learned many things.

He learned that the streets of Paris were a hard place to be, if you were young and knew no trade and could not ask for help. He learned that a mute boy could not sell newspapers, or serve as a messenger. He thought that perhaps he could find work at a factory, for his hands were as good as any other's – but again and again, gently or unkindly, he was turned away.

He learned, too, that however hard the streets of Paris were, they were lively.

Everywhere was color; every hand fancied itself an artist. The crowds in Montparnasse were greeted by buskers, by jugglers, by young ladies with skirts high enough to make Wes blush, performing dances that showed off elaborate stockings and creamy skin.

And there, one brisk and vibrant morning when he was twelve years of age, Wes learned the most important thing of all. He stood on the sidelines and watched a man with a painted face charm half a hundred onlookers.

The man had no elaborate costume, no expensive props – only gestures, and expression, and intent. He did not speak a word, not one single word, for the entire show. And the crowd? The crowd adored him.

Wes bought his first face paint the following day.

His act was awkward at first – gawkish and boyish. But the revelers of Montparnasse stopped to watch him put it on, and he worked hard to make it worth their attention.

When he set his mind to it, he found that he could put a great many things into action without speaking them. Once, by request, he played every part in Boieldieu's opera _Zoraime et Zulmare_ , to uproarious laughter and applause.

He did not earn enough for dinner every night, no – but the good days were very good indeed.

The month that Wes turned fifteen, it came to his attention that he'd gained a new regular.

He knew the children, most by name – knew Mademoiselle Sauveterre, who always gave him a pretty smile and a full franc when she came to watch. But this new man he had not seen before. He was tall and angular, with an expensive jacket, and he spoke French with the hard edge of an American accent. Wes was not surprised when one day, after the act had ended, that accented voice addressed him.

"James Abernethy," said the man, and extended his hand.

Wes, bemused, shook it.

He quirked a smile – blew up a balloon, long and yellow, and twisted the shapes of it into his own name. It was a neat trick, and one he was proud of. It had taken him most of a week to figure out how to make the letters flow together instead of using a single balloon for each.

"Wes, huh? I gotta say, kid, you've got a great act here."

Wes held his hand out level: see-sawed it one way and then the other.

"Naw, don't be modest. I seen you out here before."

The smile crept a little wider. Wes put his hand above his eyes, made a show of watching. Counted on the other hand: one, two, three, four times.

"You got me. This'll make five."

Wes lifted his eyebrows, expressive below the face paint, and waited.

"So, I got a question for you. You ever thought of going to America, kid?"

Wes hadn't.

But he'd heard stories of wide open plains and men who chased cows for a living. He'd heard the tall tales, and now James Abernethy told him of an American tradition he didn't know: the circus.

It wasn't like the Parisian Amphithéâtre Anglois, said Abernethy, oh no _._ American circuses traveled. Wagons packed full with acrobats and horse riders and lion tamers and strong men, criss-crossing the country, stopping by dozens of tiny towns where the men and women went crazy for them.

"Just so happens," Abernethy said, "I'm looking to start up a circus of my own. You want in?"

Wes tapped his ear to say that he was listening, and Abernethy sat him down and filled in the details. A week later, Wes was on a ship to New York.

It was everything Abernethy had promised.

In the circus, most days were filled with bright costumes and cheering voices. When their wagon rolled into town, smiling faces were there to greet them. Wes picked up English, and he charmed the children from Maine to California. He sent them off with fanciful balloon sculptures of horses and elephants and monkeys, and they begged their parents, "Please, can we come back for the second show?"

But it was more than Abernethy had promised, too. It was an extra pair of hands to help when he could not hammer the tent pegs into place on his own. It was late nights after the crowds had gone home, gathered in the costume tent with the strong man and the ringmaster and the lady who walked the high wire, lounging and laughing.

It was the closest he'd had to family in a long time – people who always seemed to understand what he meant to say. It lasted for two whole years, until a train wreck smashed it neatly to pieces.

In the aftermath, standing by the twisted metal near the tracks, James Abernethy gave them the news. "Well," he said, running a hand through his hair. "I guess our luck's run out, ladies and gents. Might be we could get ourselves more animals, but the wagon's just about shot, and no way we can foot the bill for a new one."

Just like that, it was over.

"Je te présente mes sincères condoléances," thought Wes, and bowed his head as though standing beside a grave.

The next years were hard ones.

He had no trade but performance, no voice with which to convince prospective employers. American factories did not want his hands any more than French ones had, and the larger circuses never seemed to have an opening for his particular set of skills. He could not afford passage back to Paris, even had he wanted to go.

And so Wes drifted.

He performed on street corners, and still he brought smiles to childrens' faces. But when those streets were dangerous, no glowering strong man dissuaded would-be muggers, and no brightly-clad companions offered safety in numbers. Some nights, he lost the change he'd earned during the day to men with rough fists, unable to call out for help.

It was just so on a dim evening in late 1906, in an alley in downtown Boston. The sea smell, sharp and bitter, reached his nose; his face paint was smeared with blood, and the air was frigid and unforgiving. Wes had lost the money meant for his dinner – lost the money for a bed in the flophouse, too.

So he stayed there the night, curled against the dark brick of the wall. He woke once in alarm, from some strange noise he could not place, only to fall back into an uneasy, dreamless sleep.

In the morning, in crude lettering half a meter tall, writing had appeared on the wall across from him. "Say, pal," it read. "Guess you're looking for someplace no one'll care about your voice."


	4. Chapter 4

Author's Notes: Thanks so much to everyone who's sticking with this fic, and especially to those who have taken the time to leave kudos or a comment. I really appreciate it!

Next up is Wolfgang.

* * *

Chapter 4: Willow

* * *

When Willow was six years old, she did not blow out the candles on her birthday cake.

Instead she let them burn down and down, until they were little guttering pools of wax among the sweetness, and her mother leaned in, frowning, to say: "Now, really, Willow. What wish could take that long?"

When Willow was eight, she stole the long, wooden matches from beside the hearth and shut herself in the pantry.

She lit every one, every single match, and watched with fascinated eyes as the fire ate its way down to the tips of her fingers. The wood transformed from pale pine to dark charcoal, like a magic trick just for her.

When the fire reached her skin, it did not seem to burn.

When Willow was eleven, she took her mother's fine silk scarf and her father's lighter and carried them away from the house, past her yard, past Cotton's Field.

She knelt on the grass in her proper young lady's skirt, and she scooped away rich, dark earth with her hands until there was a shallow hole. Then she placed the scarf in the center and flicked her father's lighter, once, twice, until the flame twinkled in her hand like a promise. The delicate lines of the scarf disappeared all at once, in a racing flash of brightness.

She watched it burn until there were only smoldering scraps left – threw in handfuls of grass when it was done, just to watch them catch. Just to make the moment last a little longer.

When Willow was twelve, Billy Hutchins tied a lit firecracker to a stray cat's tail behind the dry goods store on Main Street.

Billy was eleven years old, rough and rambunctious, and he ran through the town like he owned it. His mother could never seem to keep track of him; his father didn't much care one way or the other. Willow watched him light the fuse through the window, looking out – watched the cat twist and yowl and try to get away.

The cat lost all most of its tail, and all of its fur, and it died pawing at the remnants of the twine, still trying to get the firecracker off. Billy Hutchins laughed and laughed.

The next day at school, Willow stole Billy's books. She took her father's lighter and the kerosene in the shed out back.

And that night, long after the town was sleeping, she made herself a bonfire and watched the pages crisp and curl.

When Willow was sixteen, Willow's father gave up looking for his lighter and got a new one.

The old one was in her room, still, where it had been for the past four months. She kept it secreted in the jewelry box under things she was meant to enjoy, like the delicate dancing ballerina and a string of pearls.

When he showed her the new lighter, she smiled. "It's very handsome, father," Willow said.

And inside, some small part of her kindled, because if he had given up on the old one, why, that meant it was _hers_.

That night, to celebrate, she took it out into the darkened town with no light but the moon's light to guide her. She stood in the doorway of the abandoned church on Baker's Street, staring up at the dark, empty windows and imaging how they would light up from the inside, fierce and hot.

No one will know, she told herself, and she flicked at her lighter until a tiny flame appeared against the darkness.

The church burned half the night, and Willow stood before it, watching as long as she dared, until she heard the calls of "Fire!" and the inevitable ring of the fireman's bells as they came to extinguish the blaze.

And no one _would_ have known – only the wind picked up, and the flames swept from the church to the vacant lot next door. The grass caught, and the fire spread like waves in the ocean, only the waves were yellow and orange and so, so bright. And the tide lapped at the houses on the edge of town, one after the next, and they went up, too, a great pillar of fire, and Willow at the center of it all.

She might have explained away the charred hem of her skirt and the smell of smoke in her hair, for half the town had come out, alarmed, to keep an eye on the fire.

But Willow had not been in bed when her parents came to fetch her, and that absence was harder to explain. She had not stepped with her parents out onto the porch to watch the yellow light flickering in the night sky.

Watchful eyes took note, and Willow lied, and lied, and lied. But in the end, they had it out of her.

When Willow was twenty-two, the staff at Gainsfield Asylum for the Insane did not let her near anything that could spark a flame. She was not allowed her lighter, was not allowed a match, was not allowed into the hearth room, where patients sometimes gathered before the fire to page through dull books.

Once, when the itch got so deep into her skull that she thought she would go mad with it, Willow snuck into the kitchen. She set the whole stove ablaze, watched as the little fires flickered their tongues up, blue and orange and so, so pretty.

She had not been allowed in the west wing since, and now the itch was back, crooked nails that raked down her spine.

Just a small fire. Just a small one. To take the edge off, when the doctors came with their needles and their hoses and their stupid lies.

Or perhaps a large one would be better. Great fountains of flame, to sear away the examination tables and the cursed rooms where they left her on her own for days on end.

It was the loveliest thought Willow'd ever had: Gainsfield Asylum for the Insane, burning until the smoke swaddled the sky in a thick, black blanket.

The message, when it came, appeared on top of her cot one night before curfew. It was written on crisp, white paper, and on top of the paper lay her lighter.

"Say, pal," the paper read, in a bold, friendly hand. "I know somewhere no one'll bat an eye if you burn down the whole damn forest. What do you say?"


	5. Chapter 5

Author's Notes: Timeline notes! The "hard year" Wolfgang talks about was the Russian famine of 1891, in which a combination of weather and poor governmental choices led a lot of people to have a very bad time. The worker's symbol Wolfgang's mama writes about is the hammer and sickle, which Wolfgang alludes to knowing about in his in-game remarks. It was brand new at the time and originally was meant to symbolize an alliance between worker and peasant. His mama stops writing in 1918, which coincides with the Russian Civil War.

* * *

Chapter 5: Wolfgang

* * *

From the time he was fifteen years of age, Wolfgang was head and shoulders taller than all their neighbors, and twice as broad.

His mama was very proud.

"No need to buy a mule to pull your plow," she told Tamara Pavlovna. "My Wolfgang can do it."

And he could.

He gripped the plow with meaty hands and worked it through the cold, rocky soil. He turned the barren patches of land into a golden lake of wheat, and he made the earth give them back potatoes and beets to see them through the winter.

They were not rich, but they had enough. Once there was a hard year, when the crops did not grow. But it was just the one year, and they did not speak about it anymore, and mostly – mostly, the potatoes and the beets saw them through.

So when whisperings came from the capital when Wolfgang was twenty-one and his mama packed his bags, Wolfgang did not understand.

"Things will get worse before they get better," she told him. "Do not wait around to see the worst, solnyshko."

She kissed him on the forehead, and she sent him off with a ticket for a ship and a pile of rubles he did not know she had been saving.

That is how Wolfgang came to America, to stand on the docks that reeked like fish, carrying nothing but the duffel bag to hold his clothing. That is how Wolfgang found his new work – when a balding man with appraising eyes said, "Hey. Yeah, you. You wanna unload a ship? Twelve cents an hour."

And Wolfgang, who had never been good with money, and anyway did not know how many cents made up a ruble, said yes.

Here, too, people marveled at his strength.

"Jesus Christ," said the man who gave him twelve cents an hour, when he unloaded the whole ship in a single afternoon. "You come back here tomorrow, I got more work for you. Tell you what, I'll make it fourteen cents."

He came back tomorrow, and the day after that. They threw jobs at him, an endless stream of them, and they were jobs that left him bone-weary at day's end. He lifted cargo and beams. He unloaded vessels moored at the dock. He began to make sixteen and then seventeen cents an hour, and he sent some of it home to mama.

Wolfgang had a crate of fish balanced on one massive shoulder and a bale of cloth tucked under his other arm on the day the man appeared. He was a slim man, with a round hat and an easy smile. He dressed like he did not belong at the docks, and he trailed after Wolfgang like a puppy who wanted to play.

"They call me David Parker," said the man. "You got a name, Goliath?"

"Am Wolfgang," said Wolfgang, whose English still was not very good. He hefted the crate down from his shoulder, easy as breathing.

"Wolfgang, huh," said David Parker, admiring. "I've seen some strong guys in my day. But you? You must be about the strongest man in the world."

That's what the posters of Mr. Parker's new circus said, when Wolfgang joined it: "See the world's strongest man!" Wolfgang sent one to his mama, and he kept one for himself. Mama wrote to say that she always knew he would be famous.

Mr. Parker's circus traveled across America, and Wolfgang went with it, astounding crowds that dotted the tiny towns between the coasts. He liked the crowds, but more than that, he liked the people of the circus – the graceful lady who rode the horses and the lively boy with the painted face who always made Wolfgang laugh.

1903 was the best time of his life.

Then that time was over, in a squeal of brakes on railroad tracks and a splintering of wood. Gone were the crowds, and the horse lady, and the boy with his balloons.

Finding work was not hard. He bought a train ticket to Pennsylvania, where the factories were thick and the business was steel. When they saw that he could heft metal beams as though playing a child's game, the Bethlehem Company took him on the very same day.

The years drifted by, a blur of sameness. Some nights, Wolfgang found himself thinking of a past when he woke each morning to a new town and new faces.

News from mama grew worse, and then better, just as she had said it would. She wrote about taking back what was theirs – about a powerful new symbol, a worker's symbol. Then she did not write anymore, and Wolfgang was not stupid. He knew what that meant.

The years kept going, and in the factory, Wolfgang could not lift so much as he used to. He was forty now, no longer a young man. When he smashed his right hand between two of the beams he used to sling about so careless and easy, they told him they did not need his help any longer.

And this time, finding work was hard. His bad hand pained him. He had never learned fancy English, to find work beyond the lifting they no longer thought he was suited for.

But he had money set aside. He had saved some during the good years, and he used it now – watched it dwindle, day by day, under the force of his prodigious appetite, until only a single dollar remained.

He had one dollar, and his mama's letters, and the poster for Abernethy and Parker's, and that was all. Those three things, when once he had been the strongest man in the world.

Wolfgang began to think that perhaps his mama had been wrong. Perhaps he should have stayed at home and waited for things to get worse and then better. If you hurt yourself farming, you have friends and neighbors to help, family to watch over you while you recover.

He had no sooner thought this than a voice spoke, clear and reasonable, as though from someone sitting in the room with him.

"Say, pal," the voice said. "How'd you like to be the strongest man in the world again?"


	6. Chapter 6

Authors Notes: This chapter took a lot of time and thought before I'd ever written a word. Originally, I wanted this fic to touch on every character. Then midway, I started writing Out of Darkness, which branched from this timeline, and a plot happened. So. I did some hard thinking about what I wanted more: my original plan, or a manageable number of characters for a plotty series.

Manageable number of characters took it, hands down. So please enjoy the final chapter, and if you like my take on the survivors, I'm continuing to follow them in the subsequent fics in this series. Thank you again SO much to the folks who have been kind enough to read and leave kudos or comments. You are the best! :)

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Chapter 6: Wilson

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She stood in the doorway of the university's lab, looking in.

"Wilson," she said, "I'm going home."

If he'd looked up from his experiment, he might have seen that her hair was pinned back in a tidy bun and that she was dressed for an outing. He might have seen that her face was weary but determined. He might have seen that she'd packed a bag – that she held it now, in the hand that wore his ring.

Wilson did not look up.

He said, "Yes, darling. I'll be right behind you. Dinner at five, isn't it?"

He was not right behind her.

Wilson came up the walk at quarter till ten, eyes still alight with his own inner contemplation, mind on the breakthrough he was certain would be just around the corner.

He felt for the lights without wondering why they were out in the first place, and when the soft electric glow had returned, he took in the room without seeing what had gone missing.

"Clara?" he called. "Darling?"

But all that was left was the note on the table. By home, she had meant her mother and father's house, in Leeds.

She did not return his letters.

When he arranged a sabbatical with the university and traveled to Leeds to plead his case in person, he was turned away. "It's too late, Wilson," she said. Her eyes were tired and accusing, as though she had known it was too late for a long while – as though to say that, had he been paying attention, he would have known, too.

Wislon had been half lost in his work before; now he was consumed by it.

He spent long hours at the lab, for there was little enough to return home to. Gone were the gentler touches: the lace doily in the bedroom, the scent of Clara's rosewater perfume.

Without Clara's hands to tend the garden, the plants grew unruly; the rose bushes turned into grasping nightmare claws and scattered petals. Without Clara's insistence that he eat something of substance – "Really, now, Wilson, you skipped lunch" – he forgot most meals entirely.

The papers came from Leeds, brought by a man with slick hair and an unctuous smile. Wilson signed them and sent them away again, and that day, he did not go to the university's lab at all. That day, he poured himself a generous glass of scotch, and sat on the edge of the bed he had shared with his wife. He drank off the scotch, and then he poured himself another.

He did not hear from Clara again.

The notice arrived from the university early the next year, stilted and formal, to tell him that his funding had been revoked. Phrases like "unorthodox methods" and "inappropriate work hours" peppered the document.

Wilson spoke with the head of his department, and then with the dean.

Then he swallowed his pride and salvaged what he could – moved his equipment into the house he'd once shared with Mary. He fabricated a pulley system and wrestled the heavy machinery up the stairs into the attic on his own.

Then he shut himself away.

His mind was consumed with formulas, with mechanics, with the precise shape of gears and the exact measurements of the chemicals in his latest concoction. There was an itch in his brain, buried deep: the surety that the breakthrough he'd been waiting for would come soon.

He started staying up nights – slept at two in the morning, or four, or eight. His schedule became erratic and strange, based on the tide of his inspiration. Some nights, he forgot to sleep at all.

Months ticked by, marked by the dry sound of the grandfather clock in his attic workshop. They stretched away, and faded, and became years.

He began to chat absently as he worked, talking to the anatomical model of the skeleton on his wall. Once, he'd kept up lively one-sided conversations with his assistants at the university. Now the subject of his excited ramblings responded slightly less; that was all.

When he finally began to miss the sound of another person talking back, he refurbished an old radio, tinkering until voices came through faint with static. He sang along sometimes under his breath, crooning softly: "Some fellows look and find the sunshine. I always look and find the – a-HA, I knew sulfur would be instrumental!"

And still it eluded him – that promised epiphany. He felt it on the tip of his mind, like a word stuck in his mouth, almost spoken, not quite recalled.

There was progress, to be sure, but maddeningly slow – not nearly enough to keep up with the burning drive of his scientific muse. Each day, he learned more, but that seemed only to ensure that each day he devised new means of perpetrating his own failure.

One afternoon brought an explosion that singed away most of his eyebrows. The next dawn heralded foul-smelling sludge. Just in time for tea the day after that, he learned that his previous notes on the properties of certain crystals had been verifiably false.

Ah, failure. Wilson knew failure well. It came to visit not one or twice, but often. It settled in like an old, old friend – one who knows the house and has grown comfortable enough to drape its coat on the back of the chair and put its feet up on the coffee table.

Failure was nothing new to Wilson P. Higgsbury. But the voice that spoke from the radio after his most recent experiment gone awry – that _was_.

"Say, pal," the voice said, utterly devoid of static. "Looks like you're having some trouble."


End file.
